The A-Z of Internet Marketing Terms (Part II out of II)

Welcome to the second instalment of the internet marketing glossary, your guide to clear definitions behind the technical jargon associated with the online world! Whether you are a small business or a newbie at an SEO company this guide has been put together with you in mind, to help you feel confident and to expand your knowledge of some of the key terminology used within internet marketing.

Nofollow Links

When you are working hard to build high quality links to your site you need to make sure that the site offering you a link is not just offering you a nofollow link. A nofollow link means there is a HTML element in there that instructs search engines not to take the link into consideration, in other words the link made will not be used to assist with your rankings (rankings will be covered later on).

Outbound Links

Remember Inbound links from part one? Well this is the opposite! Outbound links are links created on your site made to another page either on the same site or to another’s. Outbound links can go to helpful resources, additional on-site information or another person’s site as the result of allowing guest posts on your site.

PPC

PPC, otherwise known as pay per click is a formula within internet marketing that is used to price adverts online. Advertisers will agree on a cost per click with internet publishers and this will be paid each time the ad is clicked on whether or not a sale is made as a result of the click through.

Query

A search query is another way of describing the keywords entered into a search engine to return relevant results.

Rankings

When talking of rankings in relation to internet marketing, this is the term used to describe where your site is ranking for certain keywords. For instance if you are a cake company and when someone types “cakes” into a search engine your site is the first one to be listed, your ranking would be page one, position one.

SERPs

If you are wondering around the office or talking to your SEO consultant and they mention “SERPS” you may be wondering what on earth they are talking about! SERPS is actually short for Search Engine Results Page. In short, a SERP is simply a list of web pages.

Tracking Code

This is data normally found in a URL that allows marketers to understand what is effective and what could perhaps be amended with regards to aspects of their online marketing efforts.

URL

The term URL is short for Uniform Resource Locater and is your websites unique formation of letters and symbols that create the address to your webpage.

Viral

Most of us have heard of the term “going viral” often in relation to something along the lines of a popular video found on YouTube. In a nutshell, viral marketing is a process whereby the advert created, whether it’s in the form of a guest post, an infographic, a video etc. is so interesting that people naturally want to share the content, causing it to “go viral”.

Web Metrics

This can also be referred to as analytics and is incredibly important when it comes to internet marketing. The reason for its importance is that it’s the collection of data about the website and those who visit it. Web metrics can tell you pretty much everything you need to know including how long people are spending on your site, how they arrived on your site and the actions they took whilst browsing the site such as filling in contact form etc.

XML

XML stands for extensible markup language and is much like HTML (discussed in part one). Although they are similar, they were created for different purposes as XML was designed to carry information whereas HTML was designed to display it.

Yoast

If you are familiar with the CMS WordPress (as discussed in part one), then you may also have heard of Yoast. Yoast is a WordPress SEO plugin that incorporates numerous features such as the ability to analyse a particular page and make tweaks in line with this for optimisation purposes.

Zuckerberg

Ok, so this might be a little bit of a cheat as we get to Z, but Mark Zuckerberg is an important man to know about in the world of internet marketing! Until him, businesses really didn’t have that much to do with social media, but Zuckerberg’s Facebook changed all of this to the point where Facebook now features heavily within many internet marketing campaigns along with Twitter and various other platforms.

So there we have it, a complete A-Z of internet marketing acronyms, phrases, people and codes to name just a few! Keep part one and two bookmarked for those times when you need a little refresher and continue to research this ever-changing industry to deliver the best results whether it is for your company’s own marketing campaign or a clients.

Vicky Dean is a Project Manager at Inbound Digital Marketing, London, UK. Vicky has worked in a number of internet marketing related roles and understands just how difficult it can be to fully understand the technical terms.